Donovan Collins-Goodman
Ms. Burdios
English 8
4 May 2013
Night EssayHave you ever been separated from your family? What if living wasn’t guaranteed? The holocaust killed over eleven million people. The purpose of the holocaust was to eliminate the entire Jewish race. In Night, by Elie Wiesel, Elie and his family were separated. Elie was forced to take care of his father while his mother and sister were killed. The Jews’ freedom, identity, and sense of hope were taken from them to make the Jews feel less than human. Is freedom really free? In Night, they lost their freedom when the Germans made a new edict that stated, “All Jews are prohibited from leaving their house for three days under penalty of death (page 10).” Also, the Germans stated that, “From this moment on, you [Jews] are under the authority of the German Army (pages 23-24)”. Without the Jews’ freedom they couldn’t fight back. With that in mind, the Germans took away the Jews’ sense of hope as well. In order to do this, however, the Germans practically starved all the Jews to death; “At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup and crust of stale bread (page 52).” The Germans also killed most of the Jews for little things like backtalk, taking an extra ration of food, or pilfering from the kitchen. To make the Jews feel less than human, the Germans took away their identities. They did this by taking away their name and referring to them as only a number. They even tattooed that number onto their skin. This was so the Jews would not forget that the Germans were of more value then they were, and that Germans were worth more than just a number and worth more then Jewish people in general. Another way was by placing them all in one type of surrounding (concentration camps). Also by forcing them all to wear a yellow star to show the world that they were "Jews". By doing that they were hoping to eventually break them down and make them feel ashamed for being Jewish. This is...

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Dehumanization is defined as the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worth of humane treatment. It also can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide. When there is severe hatred and aversion towards a different group, it can direct to classifying the rival as inhuman and treating them with bestial punishment. In the bookNight by ElieWiesel, the Jews were victims of the Nazis and were dehumanized to the equivalence of animals, treated horribly, and faced with the challenge of survival daily.
The most common example of dehumanization in the book was what they were called. The Jews were addressed to as no more than filth or an animal. When the Hungarian police ordered them out of their houses into the streets yelling “Faster! Faster! Move you lazy good-for-nothings!” (Wiesel 24) the Jews began to suffer the first steps to feeling worthless. They were ordered around, given no food or water, hit, stuffed into train cars, and mistreated. Any value or respect held for them was taken away, exemplifying degradation and dehumanization. The Jews were no longer spoke to by their names. Instead, they were given and assigned numbers that were their so-called “names” for the next months. Any historical or important surnames were quickly abolished. “I became A-7713,”...

...Experiencing the Worst but Finding the Best
Night, a memoir by ElieWiesel, is crucial in the understanding of human nature. Night represents the best and the worst of the human experience in many ways. Wiesel explains his horrible journey through the Holocaust, but tells about how it expanded his compassion, brought him closer to his father, forced him to mature quickly, and ultimately made him grow as a person. There were countless physical and emotional demands that the Holocaust insisted he go through, including hard labor, hypothermia, and watching his loved ones pass away. Through all of these atrocities, Wiesel found that every cloud has a silver lining.
In “The Nazi Party is Formed” by James Masters, he explains how Hitler formed the National Socialist Party from a minute German Workers’ Party. Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party and immediately began to try and make it succeed. He essentially “took over” recruiting members for the club. On October 16, 1919, one hundred people showed up at the monthly public meeting. In a matter of months, four to be exact, the Workers’ party grew tremendously. By this time, they had 2,000 members. Hitler used the huge turnout to kick-start the party’s propaganda. In his speech, Adolf outlined the following: the unification of all Germans; the refusal to accept the Treaty of Versailles; a mandate for additional territories for the...

... 06/05/13
People usually tend to think the bond between father and son is unbreakable, but Elie Wiesel's "Night" challenges that. Elie and his father, Shlomo, are sent to the concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, where they experience the degradation of their relationship as well as witness the degradation between other fathers and their sons. Although Eliezer feels the need to remain with his father at all costs, their relationship weakens due to the oppression and Elie eventually views his father as a burden. Aside from that, Elie no longer feels the need to defend his father as his time in the camp goes on. Both Elie and his father are subject to view the acts of unfaithfulness from sons to their fathers. Therefore, in consideration to the way Elie views his own father, the way he stops defending his father and the actions done by sons to their fathers, the reader can conclude that the natural bond between was damaged by the concentration camp conditions.
One of the negative effects that came from concentration camp life was the damage done to the relationship between father and son. As proof of this, Elie eventually views his father as an obtrusive responsibility and undeserving of his rations. After Elie and his father reach Buchenwald, he...

...again, and education will help prevent genocides in the future.
In the face of evil man can surpass the death that evil brings upon it. In the book Night by ElieWiesel, he describes the event of selection which occurs every two weeks.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. (ElieWiesel)
This quote symbolizes Elie’s first selection in Auschwitz. As he and his father follow the lines to the selection process, they walk by flames consuming live babies. This part in the book made me wince because just the thought of babies being burned can make even the toughest person get to the brink of tears. Once at the entrance to Auschwitz he faces a guard who asks questions about him. He passes the first selection and so does his father, but sadly this is the place where he leaves his mother and little sister, Tzipora, forever. After many years, Elie realizes that they were probably taken to the crematoriums right away. after living in the concentration camps for a while they go through their next selection process. Every time the selection process comes around Elie...

...1944, this is precisely what occurred to the community of Jews in Sighet, Transylvania, including a boy named ElieWiesel. Wiesel depicts the story of his time during the Holocaust in his novel, Night. In Night, Elie was taken from everything he knew, his home, his family, his friends, and his spiritual mentor. The time spent at the camps transformed him into someone he could not recognize. He lost his family by both emotional and physical separation. The faith Elie once had in humanity, God, and himself slowly slipped through his thin fingers as time passed in the camps, and Elie would never be the same.
Elie lost his faith in humanity when he arrived in Auschwitz. A man told him, “You are in Auschwitz…work or the crematorium, the choice is yours”(Wiesel 38-39). However, the choice was not his. Men from a society that displayed nothing but pure hatred towards the Jews chose their fate for them. Their fate was life or death, work or the crematorium. Elie did not understand how the rest of the world could be aware of the massacre of the Jewish population and allow it to continue. Elie saw things he would give anything to forget. “Not far from us, flames, huge flames…children being thrown into the flames”(Wiesel 32). These experiences made forgiving mankind impossible. Elie came...

...The ground is frozen, parents weep over their children, stomachs void, rigid bodies huddle together to stay warm. This was a reoccurring scene during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s Night describes the horror of what the Holocaust did, not only to the Jews, but to humanity. The disturbing neglect the Nazi party had for human beings, and the human body itself, still to this day, intensifies the fear in the hearts of many. Men, woman, and children alike witnessed selfish, dehumanizing acts, the deaths of their friends and family, and not only the loss of faith in God, but in everything.
The Nazi’s were ruthless executioners, although, when the Nazi’s first came to Sighet they were rather reassuring. They were housed in local homes and were welcomed into the Kahn’s, Elie’s neighbor, home. The Germans were seemingly polite and charming to their hosts, and, on some occasions, smiled at them. Then on the 7th day of Passover, the German’s turned on the Jews and arrested the Jewish leaders of their community. They forced the remaining people in the community to stay in their homes for three days. If they left, the penalty was death. Moishe the Beadle had warned the town’s people of this. He had told them stories about the horrors the Germans had committed, of being taken away into a forest and barely escaping death. Yet, when he came back to Sighet, no one believed him and disregarded his warnings. He had come running to Elie’s house and reminded them...

...Night
By
ElieWiesel
Introduction: Elizer Wiesel was born in the town call Sighet, Transylvania. “Night” is a novel that shows the author’s experience with his father at a German nazi concentration camp. The novel takes place during the height of the Holocaust and almost at the end of World War Two. Night is a great book and I would recommend everybody to read it. It is sad and hard to get through but it is worth it to read.
Overview: Eliezer Wiesel was a Jewish teenager who was living in his hometown Sighet, Transylvania. He was only twelve years old at that time. Elie was studying Talmud and at the mean time he wanted to study Kabbalah. He asked his father’s permission, but he was told that “You are too young for that. Maimonides tells us that one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism, a world fraught with peril. First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend.” Since he wanted to study Kabbalah so bad, Elie found a teacher for himself, not obeying his father’s instruction. His studying was interrupted when his teacher, Moishe the Beadle, was deported from Sighet because he was foreign Jew. In a few months, Moishe returned, telling a horrifying tale: the Gestapo took charge of his train, led everyone into the woods, and systematically butchered them. Nobody believed Moishe and they thought...

...﻿There were many situations that ElieWiesel has experienced which brought about a change in his character. In the memoir, Night, ElieWiesel changes in response to his concentration camp experiences. The separation from his loved ones and the horrible conditions of these camps affected Elie greatly. The Holocaust affected Elie physically, emotionally and also spiritually.
Elie changed physically by being a healthy human being into a walking skeleton. The Jews can be described as “skin and bones”. The Jews were extremely weak. They were forced to work at labor camps, which must’ve been extremely difficult. The lack of food served at the concentration camps, as well as poor quality of what was served made him that way. They were only fed stale bread and thing soup. They were eating as little as 300 calories a day! The average person should be having 1500-2000 calories a day. It gets to the point where everything revolves around food and each person’s survival. According to page 104, Elie’s father claims that the other prisoners were beating him. Elie then says “I began to abuse neighbors. They laughed at me. I promised them bread, and soup” Elie knows that food is the most valuable thing you need in the concentration camps. That is why he uses bread and soup in order to sway the other prisoners from giving his father a hard time. “One...